Issue with background color and Google Chrome

Question

Never heard of it. Try:

html, body {
  width: 100%;
  height: 100%;
  background-color: #000;
  color: #fff;
  font-family: ...;
}

Ok guys, I found a solution, . It's not great but does the trick with no side effects.

The HTML:

<span id="chromeFix"></span> 

(put this below the body tags)

The CSS:

#chromeFix { display: block; position: absolute; width: 1px; height: 100%; top: 0px; left: 0px; }

What this does to solve the issue:

It forces Chrome to think the page's content is 100% when it's not - this stops the body 'appearing' the size of the content and resolves the missing background bug. This is basically doing what height: 100% does when applied to the body or html but you don't get the side effect of having your backgrounds cut off when scrolling (past 100% page height) like you do with a 100% height on those elements.

I can sleep now =]

I had the same issue on a couple of sites and fixed it by moving the background styling from body to html (which I guess is a variation of the body {} to html, body{} technique already mentioned but shows that you can make do with the style on html only), e.g.

body {
   background-color:#000000;
   background-image:url('images/bg.png');
   background-repeat:repeat-x;
   font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;
   font-size:85%;
   color:#cccccc;

}

becomes

html {
   background-color:#000000;
   background-image:url('images/bg.png');
   background-repeat:repeat-x;
}
body {
   font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;
   font-size:85%;
   color:#cccccc;
}

This worked in IE6-8, Chrome 4-5, Safari 4, Opera 10 and Firefox 3.x with no obvious nasty side-effects.

I was able to fix this with:

html { height: 100%; }

HTML and body height 100% doesn't work in older IE versions.

You have to move the backgroundproperties from the body element to the html element.
That will fix it crossbrowser.

Simple, correct, solution - define the background image and colour in html, not body. Unless you've defined a specific height (not a percentage) in the body, its height will be assumed to be as tall as required to hold all content. so your background styling should go into html, which is the entire html document, not just the body. Simples.